


Funeral Crashers

by whatdoyouthinkmyjobis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Original Character(s), POV Outsider, Small Towns, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 15:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6430264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatdoyouthinkmyjobis/pseuds/whatdoyouthinkmyjobis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For your senior film project, you’re making a documentary about one of the weirdest things to happen in your hometown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Funeral Crashers

It had been nearly ten years since Sam and Dean Allman showed up in Valton, a sleepy farm town in the hills north of Madison, Wisconsin, but they were the sort of legends brought up in idle barber shop chatter and hushed whispers at birthday parties among the bored adults.

“What happened to the Abbot family was a damn shame. Damn shame,” said Fern, a septuagenarian who ran the local diner. “No one knows why Lynn decided to clean that hunting cabin in January of all times. Maybe she was taking advantage of the early thaw, stir crazy after the Christmas blizzard. But she went out there, and someone shot her.”

Black powder rifle, Sheriff Schultz’s report said. “Yeah, we thought it was a hunting accident. Hell, we ain’t had a so much as an accidental death since Meryl Mortimer got gored and trampled by a bull in ‘89. Last murder? Don’t know.”

“1865.” Fern considered herself the town historian. “Soldier came back from the Civil War and shot his wife.”

“Tom Abbot was old fashioned. He cared for the farm; Lynn cared for the house. Without her, he couldn’t even make himself dinner, and neither could the boys. Matt, the oldest, offered to take him in; but he had a new baby. Mr. Abbot didn’t want to be a bother,” said Sandy, the pastor’s wife. “I was taking him casseroles every three days. The ladies of the congregation, we had a meal rotation.”

“His daughter Beth, the youngest, took it upon herself to drop out of college and come home to take care of him,” said Mr. Solak, the high school English teacher. “She was the brightest kid in my class, but to be honest, she wasn’t doing so well at UW. She called me a couple times saying she felt like a fish out of water. I told her there were lots of other farm kids on campus, but she didn’t reach out. I think her grades were slipping.

“That’s why I knew those boys were lying when they said they were friends of Beth’s from college.”

“What sort of person crashes a funeral?” Peggy asked with disgust as she filed a customer’s nails.

“Lonely people,” Marsha replied.

“Sick people,” Peggy retorted.

Black powder rifle, said the report on Beth’s death. Sheriff Schultz said, “Best I can tell, Beth missed her mom. Went to the cabin to see where she was killed. A few people had gone out there and left flowers. There was already a schism in town after Lynn. No one wants to think they live next to the coward who confused a woman for a deer and wouldn’t come forward, but when Beth died the same way in the same place. That’s just not natural.

“Only three men in town hunted with black powder rifles (though I ain’t so naive as to think we don’t have a few unregistered in some attics and gun cabinets across the valley), so we used one of those tester kits. Everything was still at the lab in Madison by the time her funeral rolled around.”

“Beth was still in pigtails when I met her,” said Mr. Solak. “I had all of her brothers. She was the family jewel, and boy did the community love her. Always had her nose in a book. Big dreamer. Could spin a story out of nothing. Doted on her family; her dad especially.”

“We’re a close-knit group. The denomination moved me here nearly twenty years ago, and some people still call me ‘the new guy’,” explained Pastor Rusty, a well-bearded man in his fifties. “We know everyone here, all their cousins, all their friends. When those boys showed up at her funeral lying that they knew her, some of us, myself included, took umbrage.

“But I see a lot of broken people in my line of work, and strange as it was to have strangers at a funeral, they didn’t seem dangerous. Just lost.”

“I’m telling you Marsha, it’s on _Law and Order_ all the time. Serial killers and other sickos want to see how much they hurt people. Those boys murdered our sweet Abbots and came back to watch us cry. It’s like pornography to them!”

“Peggy, you hush! Did you see Dean playing catch with my grandsons? No man that good with children could be a bad soul.”

Marsha blushed a bit at the question. “Describe them? Well, they were both so gosh darn adorable.”

“The sort of boys who would knock up your daughter and leave her high and dry without so much as a how-do-you-do,” said Peggy.

“They were tall,” said the sheriff.

“Big, warm smiles. Sad eyes,” said Pastor Rusty.

“Cute dimples,” added Sandy.

“Look, if I was a younger woman, I’d have taken at least one of them out for a spin and let the town talk,” said Fern. “Tight little asses.”

Pastor Rusty sighed. “I asked Matt and Tom what they wanted to do, and bless their hearts, they said to play along. Robbie, the youngest and closest to Beth was livid, but they begged him not to cause a scene.”

The Abbot family declined to be interviewed for this film.

“I asked the Allmans to stay for the potluck,” said Sandy. “The way they ate, Dean especially, you’d have thought they never had a home cooked meal before.”

“Dean liked my pie, and he tried every one,” Fern grinned lustily. “Sam ate mostly salad and chicken.”

“Course I was suspicious,” said the sheriff. “Spent a while chatting them up. They asked a lotta questions about the shootings. Weird questions about cold spots and weird smells. It’s January near a cow pasture. You bet your ass it was cold and ripe.

“Kept an eye on them at the graveyard. The taller one wandered a bit, and I think the other one was actually flirting with Kathy McGrath. At the graveside. Other than bein’ tacky and weird, there isn’t much else to say about it.”

Mr. Solak fiddled with his fingers as he spoke. “We probably would have forgotten about them if it hadn’t been for the fires that night. Someone burned down the cabin where Beth and her mom died. I was one of the first responders throwing buckets of snow in the blaze. Glad is wasn’t the fall or the whole woods would have gone up in smoke.”

“I understand the family in their moment of grief not wanting to confront those hooligans, but Sheriff Schultz really dropped the ball,” said Peggy as she applied a second coat of Petal Pink to Marsha’s nails. “He should have taken finger prints or run their plates or something.”

“Peggy Anker has been on a one-woman campaign for my job for a decade," the sheriff sighed.

“I did run their plates, albeit the day after the fires. Plates were stolen. Those boys, whatever their names were ‘cause they weren’t Sam and Dean Allman, drove a beautiful black Impala. ‘67. Pristine. And old Daryl out on Boot Jack road, the road closest to the cabin, said he saw it drive by shortly before someone sounded the hue and cry for the fire. I did a wider search and turns out a car like that’s been seen near a bunch of graveyard desecrations across the country.”

Peggy’s face was red with rage. “First, they murdered the Abbot women, then they burned down a hunting cabin. That wasn’t perverted enough for them, so they dug up a Civil War soldier’s grave and set his remains on fire!”

Fern busied herself scrubbing the diner counter. “Funny thing is, and mind you I didn’t know this at the time, that grave belonged to the soldier who shot his wife in 1865. Cabin too. I’m not a woman who believes in coincidence, but damned if I know what to make of that.”

Sheriff Schultz leaned across his desk and stared directly into the camera. “I’m not convinced those boys killed Lynn and Beth, but iffen they roll through town again, you betcha we’re having a more formal talk at the station.”


End file.
